Faculty/Author Profile

Joseph P. Salvo

HIT Entertainment

General Counsel VP & Assistant General Counsel

New York, NY, USA

Joseph P. Salvo currently serves as General Counsel of HiT Entertainment, an international children’s entertainment company that owns such pre-eminent pre-school brands as Barney, Thomas the Tank, Bob the Builder and Angelina Ballerina. He also serves as Vice President & Associate General Counsel at Mattel, Inc., which acquired HiT in February, 2012. HiT is involved in all forms of production and licensing, including television, film, audio, home video and consumer products.

Prior to becoming General Counsel to HiT, Joe spent 13 years working for a combination of Sony Music, Arista Records and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, where he was involved in a wide variety of contract, licensing and intellectual property issues and personally handled contract negotiations and drafting for such diverse artists as Bruce Springsteen, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Yo Yo Ma and John Mayer.

Joe also served as Special Counsel at Weil Gotshal and Manges from 2006-2008, where he counseled many of the largest internet music service providers on international publishing and sound recording rights issues, including Apple, MySpace, Yahoo, AOL, Pandora, MediaNet and Sony, and coordinated the trial team for the UK Copyright Tribunal proceeding that set the first-of-its-kind UK publishing rates for internet distribution of music.

Joe also serves as the current President of the Copyright Society of the USA (through June 2014), and has been an adjunct professor of law, teaching Entertainment Law at St John’s University School of Law in NY, since 2001.